Readers' comments

There is a fundamental conflict between health care insurers and health care providers. Insurers want to collect the maximum in premiums while paying the least on care. Providers want to extract the maximum in payments while while keeping paying patients alive. Providers want to keep people alive as long as it is profitable while insurers want their insured to die quickly and cheaply. Until incentives are changed, US health care will be dominated by these two striving for advantage. Sadly, quality of life and death doesn't matter to either.

One of the biggest issues comparing insurance plans and other complex products, is that the sellers actively make the plans confusing and difficult to compare.

This is especially true of private health insurance. You have to weigh up so many options, and it is very difficult to see beforehand which plan is risky/cheap/good value etc.

It would be best if there was a limited federally mandated suite of plans, which all insurers must sell. Of course it must be easy for insurers to innovate and add plans, but in this case ALL insurers must offer the same plan. Then it would a trivial matter to compare prices. Of course insurers would howl at this. It would be an utter tragedy for them if consumers could directly compare prices. There would then be huge pressure on insurers who would then actively negotiate with medical practitioners to lower prices. Practitioners should also have a public listed price for everything they do.

The same system should be forces on mobile phone tariffs, and energy bills.

We should try to create proper markets for these products, to create buyer power.

I'm amazed at the low quality of the video content on this site. Between the terribly wavering voice-overs like this one and the awkward on screen presentations by people who should stick to writing, it's pretty much unwatchable. If video is going to be a big push the economist should invest in professionals.

I would hope the economist would get the facts straight with this report. To say House Republicans "would not fund the government unless Obamacare is scrapped" is a completely false statement. Republicans were asking to delay the penalty for individuals because Obama delayed the penalty for businesses. The House tried to fund the government with the delay in the penalty in place. It's more accurate to say the Senate Democrats would not fund the government unless everything they asked for was in the funding bill.